Cabin Fever (2003, Eli Roth) (v)

While Ed Gonzalez suggests that Cabin Fever is an allegory for the Reagan administration's piss-poor response to AIDS in the 80s, and I think there's something interesting in the contrast between the clean and pretty images of this 2003 movie and the grimy funk of the 70s horror that Roth clearly admires (especially in the context of a virus story), that doesn't excuse it from being one of the worst-written movies I've seen since May. Text before subtext, I always say. (Actually, I've never said that, but I think I've always believed it.)

And the text is amazingly, frustratingly terrible. Nearly every important moment in the story is lazily contrived to the Nth degree: the decision to drink only beer, the nearby camper and his dog, the attempt to get help from the nearby cabin, the damaged truck (which is ridiculously unspecific; there may as well be a Sims-style status bar over the character that fixes it), and the biting kid, the fucking kid that bites. Biting Kid is representative of how arbitrary everything in the story is; Roth sets up "rules" for his behavior in the beginning, then blatantly violates them at the end for the sake of moving the movie forward.

And a little thought and imagination could've improved things. Roth reveals the source of the infection early on, presumably in order to create some Hitchcockian tension. But he blows this (there should be at least one moment when someone accidentally knocks over a glass of bad water), and it turns out the tension is a zero-sum game anyway; either they drink it, or they don't. If the reveal of the source had been delayed, the audience would've been in the same place as the characters, confused and terrified as to the source of the disease. The arguments and strategies the characters devise for protecting themselves would've made them more sympathetic (always key to a horror story is, "What would I do in that situation?"); instead, we know what the problem is and are encouraged to take a smug, superior view of things.

I suppose some would say that all of the above is beside the point, that Cabin Fever is not a horror film but a nightmare comedy, like After Hours. Perhaps. But a nightmare comedy is more than just a bunch of crazy shit that happens; it's a philosophical statement, that the universe is random and unknowable, and it's expressed through the travails of a Job-like Everyman. But the presence of a virus and its known vector undercuts the philosophy, and the ill-defined and obnoxious characters undercut the Everyman. It's just a bunch of crazy shit.